Sunday, December 16, 2012

This post concerns the very, very ancient, but it’s
here because it’s a fascinating tale. It seems the fierce competition for fame between
two palentologists ~ O.C. Marsh of Yale and Edward Cope of Philadelphia ~ led
to the false creation of the Bronosaurus, a creature that, as it turns out,
never existed.

According to NPR, quoting Matt Lamanna of the
Carnegie Museum of Natural History:

It was in the heat of this competition, in 1877, that
Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed,
leaf-eating dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. It was missing a skull, so in 1883
when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, Lamanna says he used
the head of another dinosaur — thought to be a Camarasaurus — to complete the
skeleton.

"Two years later," Lamanna says, "his
fossil collectors that were working out West sent him a second skeleton that he
thought belonged to a different dinosaur that he named Brontosaurus."

But it wasn't a different dinosaur. It was simply a
more complete Apatosaurus — one that Marsh, in his rush to one-up Cope, carelessly
and quickly mistook for something new.

You can easily guess the rest of the story. What’s
particularly amazing is that the two warring paleontologists even ordered some
dinosaur skeletons to be smashed to pieces while still in the ground, just so
the other fellow wouldn’t unearth them.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Rome's long and enigmatic chain of emperors was rife
with complex personalities, few the match of Constantine (282-337). In his new
Constantine the Emperor, biographer David Potter makes a case for this
emperor's historical prominence.

"No Roman emperor had a greater impact on the
modern world than did Constantine. The reason is not simply that he converted
to Christianity but that he did so in a way that brought his subjects along
after him.”

"Alongside the visionary who believed that his
success came from the direct intervention of his God, resided an aggressive
warrior, a sometimes cruel partner, and an immensely shrewd ruler. These
characteristics, combined together in a long and remarkable career, are those
that restored the Roman Empire to its former glory."

Potter, a professor of Greek and Roman history at the
University of Michigan, actually offers this major hunk of history in a
surprisingly readable and compelling manner. His description is excellent of
Constantine's complicated world with its spreading Christian influence,
altogether as good a story as the sordid family strife surrounding this
emperor.

Potter's book ~ published by Oxford University Press ~ is available from Amazon.com. Please see the link at the top of the "Ancient Tides Books" column at the left of this page.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Northern European populations ~ British,
Scandinavians, French and Eastern Europeans ~ descend from a mixture of two ancestral
populations, one of which is related to Native Americans. This genetic discovery
helps understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry,
while explaining genetic similarities among the very divergent groups.

According to Science Daily, quoting Nick Patterson,
first author of the report published in the November issue of Genetics
magazine:

"There is a genetic link between the paleolithic
population of Europe and modern Native Americans. The evidence is that the
population that crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia into the Americas more
than 15,000 years ago was likely related to the ancient population of
Europe."

One of these ancestral populations was the first
farming population of Europe, whose DNA lives on today in relatively unmixed
form in Sardinians and the people of the Basque Country, and in at least the
Druze population in the Middle East.

The other ancestral population is likely to have been
the initial hunter-gathering population of Europe. These two populations were
very different when they met. Today the hunter-gathering ancestral population
of Europe appears to have its closest affinity to people in far Northeastern
Siberia and Native Americans.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Since their startling discovery in Peru’s coastal
area during the 1920s, mystery still surrounds the so-called Nazca lines,
depicting several massive images decipherable only from high altitudes.

The vast majority of the lines date from 200 BC to
500 AD, to a time when a people referred to as the Nazca inhabited the region.
The earliest lines, created with piled up stones, date as far back as 500 BC.

According to LiveScience.com:

The purpose of the lines continues to elude
researchers and remains a matter of conjecture. Ancient Nazca culture was
prehistoric, which means they left no written records.

One idea is that they are linked to the heavens with
some of the lines representing constellations in the night sky. Another idea is
that the lines play a role in pilgrimage, with one walking across them to reach
a sacred place such as Cahuachi and its adobe pyramids.

Yet another idea is
that the lines are connected with water, something vital to life yet hard to
get in the desert, and may have played a part in water-based rituals.

In the absence of a firm archaeological conclusion a
number of fringe theories have popped up, especially several aligned with
“ancient astronaut” theories. A less radical suggestion is that the Nazca
people used balloons to observe the lines from high altitudes, something for which
there still is no archaeological evidence.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Evidence that some Stone Age cultures may have
considered dead young men to be threatening to living people could be the
reason groups of newly discovered skulls were buried with smashed-in faces.

The 10,000-year-old skulls were found in Syria. They appear
to have been dug up several years after being buried with their bodies,
separated, then reburied. No one knows why Neolithic societies buried clusters
of skulls - often near or underneath settlements.

Like those found in other caches, they have been
cleanly separated from their spines, suggesting they were collected from dead
bodies that had already begun to decompose. Patterns on the bone indicate that
some had been decomposing for longer than others, making it likely that they
were all gathered together for a specific purpose.

Most of the skulls belonged to adult males between 18
and 30 years old.

Friday, October 26, 2012

As any reader of the New Testament knows, there are
several women named Mary and scripture is not clear as to which is which.
Meanwhile, readers make a number of assumptions regarding Mary Magdalene, most
of which are unsubstantiated in scripture.

Smithsonian.com is exploring this situation in a
detailed article by James Carroll, who writes:

In one age after another her image was reinvented,
from prostitute to sibyl to mystic to celibate nun to passive helpmeet to
feminist icon to the matriarch of divinity’s secret dynasty. How the past is
remembered, how sexual desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate
their separate impulses; how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how
tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted; how fallibility
is reckoned with, and how sweet devotion can be made to serve violent
domination—all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman who
befriended Jesus of Nazareth.

One of the first matters Carroll addresses is the biblical
presence of multiple Marys:

There are several Marys—not least, of course, Mary
the mother of Jesus. But there is Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and
Lazarus. There is Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and Mary the wife of
Clopas. Equally important, there are three unnamed women who are expressly
identified as sexual sinners—the woman with a “bad name” who wipes Jesus’ feet
with ointment as a signal of repentance, a Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at
a well and an adulteress whom Pharisees haul before Jesus to see if he will
condemn her. The first thing to do in unraveling the tapestry of Mary Magdalene
is to tease out the threads that properly belong to these other women. Some of
these threads are themselves quite knotted.

The article also discusses a key aspect of the Magdalene
confusion that carries contemporary overtones is the male need to dominate
women, especially in the Catholic Church.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Ancient myths including
Beowulf, Homer’s Illiad and the traditional Irish poem Táin Bó Cuailnge likely
are based on real communities and people, according to researchers who compared
the complex web of the characters’ relationships with the type of social
networks occurring in real life.

Scientists at Coventry
University calculated characters’ popularity based on how many relationships
they had with other characters and whether they were friends or enemies. Then they examined the overall dynamic between the cast as a whole.

According to the The
Telegraph:

Their results, published in
the journal Europhysics Letters, showed that the societies depicted in
the stories strongly mirrored real social networks of company directors, film
actors and scientists which had been mapped out by other academics.

In contrast they found
that four works known to be entirely fictional ~ Shakespeare's Richard III,
Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of Rowling's
Harry Potter series and Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo ~ contained
telltale signs of being fictional.

"In the myths but also in real social networks, you tend to have
sub-communities who do not know anybody else," says Pádraig Mac Carron, co-author of the report. "In fiction, everyone tends to be
completely connected with each other."

"In reality you also have popular people with
hundreds of friends, then a few people with maybe 70, and a lot of people with
a lot less friends," he adds. "But [in fiction] you get a lot of characters who have the
same number of friends. Almost everyone that Harry Potter knows and interacts
with also meets and interacts with Ron and Hermione, for example."

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Archaeologists digging near Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem
have uncovered a tiny seal that could possibly be the first evidence of Samson,
the Biblical slayer of Philistines.

The seal appears to depict the Old Testament story of
Samson, whose might was undone by his lust for the temptress Delilah, and his
fight with a lion. It measures less than an inch in diameter, shows a large
animal with a feline tail attacking a human figure.

According to the Daily Mail:

The seal was discovered at a level of excavation that
dates it to roughly the 11th century BC, when Israelite tribes had moved into
the area after Joshua's conquest of Canaan. It was a time when the Jews were
led by ad hoc leaders known as judges, one of whom was Samson.

The location also indicates that the figure on the seal
could represent Samson, according to Israeli archaeologists Professor Shlomo
Bunimovitz and Dr Zvi Lederman.

Beit Shemesh is regularly mentioned in the Old Testament,
most notably in chapter 6 of the book of Samuel I - the ruler of Israel
immediately after Samson - as being the first city encountered by the ark of
the covenant on its way back from Philistia after having been captured by the
Philistines in battle.

A popular character in the Old Testament, Samson was said
to have been given supernatural strength by God to allow him to overcome his
enemies. He discovered his strength when he was accosted by a lion
on his way to propose to a Philistine woman, killing it with his bare hands.

The finds suggest that cleanliness meant a lot to the
Vikings. Written sources from medieval England also back up this view. In his
chronicle from 1220 – a couple of centuries after the Vikings had ravaged
England – John of Wallingford described the Vikings as well-groomed
heartbreakers:

”They had also conquered, or planned to conquer, all
the country’s best cities and caused many hardships for the country’s original
citizens, for they were – according to their country’s customs – in the habit
of combing their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their
clothes frequently and to draw attention to themselves by means of many such
frivolous whims. In this way, they sieged the married women’s virtue and
persuaded the daughters of even noble men to become their mistresses,” wrote
Wallingford.

Cleanliness was one of five discussions
ScienceNordic.com has presented to refute the top five popular myths regarding
Vikings. Others include that Vikings wore horned helmets, looked like we do
today, wore clothing admired throughout the world, and were scarred by battle
wounds.

Tides represent the high and low, the ebb and flow. They're the rhythm spanning millennia and an apt image for this blog as it seeks to provide accounts linking today with ages long past. New archaeological finds and scholarly speculations help us better understand our ancestors and this small planet we've shared. And the better we understand our forebears and their environs, the better we know ourselves.

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